


maybe we don't ever come down

by mollivanders



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Universe, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, another ghost story!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 00:32:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14320527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: “Come on, Jyn!” he calls, as if he could make her short legs run faster by sheer will, and they skid past a pair of medics with a full stretcher. “Come on!”As soon as he says it, a voice crackles over the comm system in dire warning.Imperial troops have entered the base, the sentry warns before being cut off abruptly and Cassian stumbles on his feet, pushing Jyn in front of him up the transport’s ramp.





	maybe we don't ever come down

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ruby-red-inky-blue for the Holiday Gift Fic giveaway with the prompt of 'something a little spooky for rebelcaptain'. Title comes from The Horrible Crowes' _Ladykiller_.

They shouldn’t have been on Hoth when it happened.

They should have been on Corellia, making contact with the criminal underground, or in transit, or on Home One. Instead, their cover had been blown, they’d been re-routed, and they’d made it to Echo Base an hour before the Empire.

Their timing, he thinks, could have been better.

Cassian doesn’t let himself think beyond that as they race to the hangar bay, Jyn close on his heels as they barrel towards the transport. It’s a clunky ship, battered and old, and if they had time to choose which one they boarded he’d choose any other. Time is the one thing they don’t have though, and he checks over his shoulder _one more time_ to make sure she’s still there. She has an angry look on her face undercut by the knowledge of loss and his heart crackles.

“Come on, Jyn!” he calls, as if he could make her short legs run faster by sheer will, and they skid past a pair of medics with a full stretcher. “Come on!”

As soon as he says it, a voice crackles over the comm system in dire warning.

 _Imperial troops have entered the base_ , the sentry warns before being cut off abruptly and Cassian stumbles on his feet, pushing Jyn in front of him up the transport’s ramp.

“Go, go, go,” he yells over the rising sound of blaster fire and feels the ramp shift beneath his boots, pulling him up into the ship. He doesn’t know if the medics made it. They can’t quite stop running as they crash into the main hold of the ship with the last of the Echo Base forces, and he catches himself on a loose strap. Jyn finally comes to a shaky halt, clutching the data files they’d grabbed from Intelligence before the tunnels had collapsed, panting in ragged breaths that sync with his.

“Hang on!” someone yells from down the line and the ship peels off the ground with an unsteady lurch, shooting out like a proton torpedo – or maybe that was their hull being attacked by ground forces. He catches Jyn’s eye and he can guess her thoughts mirror his own, and not for the first time. A rebel soldier Cassian doesn’t recognize sinks to her knees to keep from outright falling and he lurches backwards against the bulkhead. Whatever this transport was, it wasn’t designed for this many passengers.

The sounds of the ground battle continue below and he reaches for Jyn’s hand, the only steady point in space. She still has the data files clutched to her chest with one arm and he squeezes her hand, her pulse slowing to a gallop under his fingers. There’s something not quite right about this hold, but he can’t put his finger on it. There’s no time.

The cargo hold is deathly quiet, filled with trapped soldiers. All of them know another battle in the stars is waiting for them. They all know their ion cannons are out; the base is gone; at least five Star Destroyers are waiting for them; and half the transports haven’t made it. Nobody needs to say it.

(Nobody says a word.)

A jolt batters the transport and they fall against each other in cluttered disarray once more, Jyn falling against him as she stares at nothing. Another turbolaser slams the transport – she locks eyes with him – he clings to a last desperate hope –

The transport jumps to hyperspace.

+

The captain of the transport had given them the grim news after the first jump to hyperspace. By the last count, only thirteen transports had made it away from Hoth, including theirs, and that didn’t count anyone left on the surface still trying to leave.

“We’ll rendez-vous with the fleet as soon as we can,” she’d said, explaining the decoy jumps the Alliance had set up to avoid leading the Empire directly to the rest of the fleet. “But we have enough rations until our next resupply.”

By Cassian’s estimate, the normal crew complement for a transport this size was barely ten, and they’d made it off Hoth with nearly four times that. It was a devastating loss to the rebellion, and he’d expected tighter belts than usual for the survivors. If they’d had warning, they could have supplied the ship for passengers, but there had barely been warning enough to scramble their forces at all.

“Rations for all these people?” he asked, and the captain shot him a strange look.

“You can talk to the supply officer if you can find him,” she said curtly, turning back to the bridge. “But I don’t think any of us need that flippant tone after Hoth, _captain_.”

He’d forgotten again.

It didn’t come up that often, especially on missions, but he and Jyn and Bodhi had been _different_ when they came back from Scarif. Most people treated them the same, but Jyn said he’d been clinically dead for three minutes before they revived him. Bodhi still didn’t know how he’d survived the explosion, and Jyn – well, nobody could figure out even now how she’d survived the blast.

(Skywalker had tried to talk to her – and then hadn’t.)

All in all, he’d come to treat death differently. They all had.

Escaping the captain’s surly gaze, he and Jyn disappeared to their assigned quarters, avoiding the distraught mingling in the hold. He was used to death in the field, at his own hand or by others, but he’d learned long ago living with death was a quick way to the grave in turn.

Jyn walked in silence next to him, and when they lock the door behind them, she dumped the data files on the cot and sat next to them, hands clasped in a loose knot over her knees. Her eyes are open but staring at nothingness, and the loose hold of her body belies the feral animal struggling within. Without a word, he turns the lights back off and pushes the files aside to mirror her posture. He knows her responses intimately; he can recognize the promise of a kiss as much as the coiling of a spring without a single word.

He doesn’t presume, or push, but sits in solitude with her, trying not think of the list of the dead they’d left behind and brought with them.

He keeps thinking about those medics.

Gingerly, he pushes the files aside and mirrors her posture, keeping an eye trained on her, waiting.

Without warning she let out a ragged breath, forcing it back in with effort, and shut her eyes as Cassian wrapped an arm around her, holding her steady.

“Bodhi – ” she manages to say, and he shut his eyes with effort. “I saw Bodhi.”

“With Wedge,” he reminded her. “Antilles won’t let anything happen.”

She shakes her head in response but is unable to speak again, and even he doesn’t know if he believes it, but the rebellion was built on little more than almost-belief in the first place. They’d made it off Scarif, the three of them, and he refused to believe Bodhi would go down in a frenzied battle like Hoth; it was hard to imagine him dying at all.

But Jyn’s worry nestled inside him, wondering.

She doesn’t seem able to speak after that. Instead, she let him pull her back with him onto the cot, arms locked tight around her, providing some semblance of protection in the midst of an evacuation. She curls her fists into his shirt, holding him close as he tries not to think about what they already lost, what they might still lose, and instinctively tightens his hold around her.

“I can’t believe,” she gasps into his shirt, sounding halfway before hysterical laugh and racked sobs, “I’m going to miss our quarters on Hoth.” His shirt goes damp as she pulls herself even closer, cocooning against him, and he shuts his eyes, thinking only of _right here_ , _right now_ , and her.

Somehow, in the desperate cling of each other’s arms, they drift off to sleep.

+

As the transport makes jump after jump, stopping at anonymous ports to transmit messages through encrypted chains back to Command, Jyn spends more and more time on shift work, which in of itself is a challenge given how little there is to do on the ship. He gives her space, recognizing the signs in herself as much as himself.

They’d lost. After everything they’d lost before, and all the days in between, Echo Base felt like a true defeat.

But he’s there every night when she slips back into their quarters, tugging her boots off to crawl into the cot beside him, and he doesn’t feign sleep. Her hands trace the lines of his face, as if committing them to memory, and her wordless touch stokes a grieving fire inside him that he can’t return, and that she doesn’t ask for. Instead, his arms wrap around her as she shifts closer to him, cradled in the nook of his body, as they force themselves asleep.

(At least, he thinks, she still comes home.)

Her absence pulls at him though, as though there’s a part of the puzzle he’s not seeing here, something he hasn’t quite put together. Slowly though, at mess halls and briefing updates, he realizes what has been drawing at him; what’s been drawing at Jyn.

There are fewer people on the ship than there were at the start.

(The battle isn’t really over.)

“I saw Bodhi,” she whispers in his ear as he fights sleep. “I saw them all, Cassian.”

A chill goes down his back as he sits up to look at her, curled up and small in the narrow cot. She looks up at him from her fetal position and his heart pounds harder and harder and harder.

“I see _you_ ,” he says hoarsely. “ _You’re_ still here.”

She pushes herself up next to him, fingers catching in the loose hair that falls over his face. She seems less stricken and more resigned, as if she doesn’t need him to tell her this anymore.

“Do you remember Scarif?” she asks and he dissents, confirming what she knows. “Do you remember what really happened?”

“Jyn,” he says, voice gone so hoarse he can barely speak, and she crawls into his lap, pressing a wistful kiss to his eyes, to the corner of his lips, down his throat.

“I do,” she says into the shell of his ear. “We lived, Cassian.” She presses a hesitant kiss to the skin just below and he tightens his grip on her waist, desperate to believe her. “But we died first.”

His eyes fall shut, knowing. He’d died for three minutes. He knows.

“What else?” he asks, knowing this isn’t the end of her story, knowing something more is coming.

“I think,” she says, “I saw us in the transport.”

She finds no rest that night, and neither does he.

+

There is no way to disprove her visions, no way to prove they died – almost died – on Hoth, the same way they died – almost died – on Scarif. Maybe they did. He feels alive, seems alive, seems known to be alive.

But there’s no explanation for how Jyn survived Scarif, and there’s no reason he came back from the dead, and there’s no reason Bodhi found them.

 _“I saw Bodhi,”_ she’d said, and he choked on the memory, a thousand what-ifs piling in his imagination.

He intercepts the captain, calling in three levels of favors before she agrees to his request.

“One more thing,” he asks as she turns away, “did the medics make it on board? At Echo Base?”

The captain pauses in her tracks and he catches the trepidation in her stance before she speaks.

“Why are you asking me that now, captain?” she asks. “Have you seen them?”

His confusion shows so she sighs and gives the explanation.

“Nobody’s seen them since we took off. You’re the second person to ask after them.”

(He can guess at the first without difficulty.)

+

It’s another two jumps before he has it, but when Jyn comes back that night he’s up and waiting.

“A report came in,” he says, handing her the datapad with suppressed hope. He believes – but she’s long needed more than hope to build on. She’s needed faith, and family, and belief ties her to both.

“What is this?” she asks and then, when he only looks at it meaningfully in response, sits next to him on the cot, flipping through the screens. The fluorescent lights casts a glare over the datapad but he can still see the essentials: transport lists, fleet complements, supplemental troops, new commitments from allied planets, and at the end, a list of known survivors that scrolls on longer than even he would have expected. He points at a name as she slows the data feed, tapping at it with satisfaction.

“Bodhi got out,” he says. “He was badly injured – but, ” he takes a reassuring breath, “he’s out of the woods. I already checked the list. Pathfinder trainees got out on the first transport. Chirrut and Baze checked in as well. They’re alive.”

_We’re alive._

Her relief washes over her face like a wave; it’s a palpable thing that buoys her beyond these four walls and this ship.

“How’d you get this?” she asks, her voice a bare whisper. “Everyone said there’s been no word in or out of Command.”

He shrugs. “I called in some favors.”

He’s unprepared for the hug she flings around him, clambering across his lap to hold him more tightly. It’s different than these last few days; stronger and more defiantly alive and full of the fire that welded them together in the first place. Cautiously he wraps his arms around her in turn, his fingers trailing into fugitive tresses, and tightens his grip when she takes a shuddering breath. She hasn’t let him this close since the battle, for all that she’s been in his arms every night since then.

“How many favors?” she asks and his lips twist, a breath escaping him in rattled mirth.

“Enough,” he says, and she drops the subject, shifting in his lap to look at him properly.

“I’ll have to work on getting you more,” she says, an old note of criminal mischief in her voice and he sighs but puts up no further protest as she looks around the quarters.

“We’re alive,” he says then, breaking the moment, and holding her face in her hands. “I know what you saw. But for now, we’re alive.”

Her gaze is unsteady on his, hope warring with expectation, and she lets out a rattled sigh.

“For now,” she agrees, and the wisp of her grief fades away as she leans down to kiss him. A tender flame bursts inside his chest and he and tangles his hands in hers, savoring the comfort of her touch in this space. “As long as we’re here. As long as they’re here.”

He wants to ask a simple question then – something about staying here forever, with him – but holds back. He _wants_ to say _home is where you are_ but he still worries it’s too much, just now. She’s only just come back to full life, from her three minutes of death back into his arms.

“As long as you’re here,” he says instead. His heart jumps as she lifts his hands to her lips, pressing a gentle kiss to each. His eyes fall shut as she wraps her arms back around him, resting her head on his chest.

“I am,” she answers. “You are.” He reaches up to pull her into another kiss, greedy and defiant against the galaxy and the Empire and Death itself, and feels her last worries slide away into the night.

(Beyond their quarters, so do the rest of the dead.)

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: In my world, they lived! but I thought this was a neat chance to think about how living with surviving Scarif (and then Hoth) would impact Jyn and Cassian, with some bonus supernatural aspects. I also like the idea of the Rogue One team being linked in life and death, and that they could sense if they were in danger - or out of the woods.
> 
> I'm [ladytharen](http://ladytharen.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr if you want to say hi!


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